ARM processors and the developing Dragon Chip
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson
are stepping stones to Puppy Quantum
(The first Puppy with multi dimensional processing)
- some of these are not yet available . . .

My son just purchased a Coby Tablet PC with Android, something I'd managed to ignore until now.

I'm watching the development of this ARM Pup thing with interest, and I like this device, I think. It's hard to tell until you have one out of the box and play with it. I wonder if the OS is some version of Android...

I also assume that the screen, like my son's Coby, would have the lower tech 'resistant' touch interface, as opposed to the nifty 'capacitative' touch on higher end ware. (Just throwing out techie terms I didn't even know until about two weeks ago, trying to look cool until some Alpha geek emerges to eclipse my light. )

And most importantly, I don't know how the different touch interfaces change the programming of the device's OS. I would assume that the capacitative interface is more demanding do to its greater set of capabilities.

But back to Lobster's original topic: should Puppy 6 be based on Debian? I think it's up to the lead developer, just as the basing of 5.3 on Slackware was the decision--with Barry's assent, I gather--of the project lead.

I was rather under the impression that the 6x series might be based on some .rpm distro, probably Mageia, but I can't remember where I got that idea. I was excited by it, to expand Puppy as a concept within Linux as opposed to JUST another distro...or YET another distro, if I haven't made enough .rpm references YET. Hey, Yet Another Puppy: it spells YAP! (In the U.S. we refer to the barking of a small dog as 'yapping.' Don't know if that registers in the rest of the English-speaking world.)

I have seen some yapping here whenever .rpm's are mentioned, but .deb's are not always perfect either.

Truth is, it's all Linux, and as long as it's Puppy and it works, I don't really care WHERE the binaries came from.

There is no reason why Quirky or Racy could not be the new Puppy
. . . even Wary
They are all Woof built.
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/Woof
That would be great.
With the new Woof, we could have several versions
for different situations._________________Puppy WIKI

Maybe, the prime requirement for Puppy 6 should be is that everything has been created from the source tree. That it is not another Distro. take-off. Even to see if we, "The Puppy Community", have developed to the stage that we can do it!

Maybe, Lobster, that should be the next BIG project, not to puppy6 over the next twelve months, but to get all these packages into one repositry, with an initial package owner or creator, and see just what we have so we can see if we can start filling in the holes. It wouldn't even matter at this point, if they weren't the latest and greatest, as long as they were complete and worked with a stable version of puppy. I'm not even sure that it should matter in the first place, whether it should matter if there was any intention to eventually use them or not! There are already a lot of packages out there, that have been added to puppy that were created or compiled from source trees by puppyians.

I haven't noticed this thread until now, so I'll express my opinion of what Puppy 6 should look like.

I see it as the direct descendant of Puppy 5.x, but more organized and efficient, since the core Puppy developers have gained lots of experience with Woof and know more about the distributions it supports (most notably, Ubuntu, Debian and Slackware). I also think it's time to start thinking about making Puppy more "serious" in terms of infrastructure and the community structure; I think we should implement some automated package building solution (to make Puppy more source-based) and form a team of lead developers, which will coordinate the work of small, task-specific teams, such as a "kernel team", an artwork team, etc'.

However, words are words, time to talk about code.

At the moment I'm working on 4 components that form the infrastructure needed for a modern distribution:
- A competitor to Woof - I implemented something very similar to Woof, but more modular, much faster (15 mins vs. Woof's 5 hours, on my netbook, from the package processing part to the bootable image) and smarter. The main features are good design, efficient code, zero legacy code and generic nature (e.g less hard dependencies on specific packages). It's fully compatible with Woof's configuration format, so I was able to build a Slacko with it; the result was quite crude (i.e it was way bigger), but RAM usage was about 10 MB lower. It's ready and works great.
- A package building server - an automated, complete and sanitized solution for building packages. This server contains well-tested build scripts for all applications shipped with the distribution; the rest is taken from another distribution. This means we have good balance between size and ease of development: the base packages are provided by some "upstream" source, while the part of the operating system users care about is totally customizable. This server makes sure the packages are built in a clean environment using jails and virtualization, so development is easier and more future-proof. I use it for several months and it's great.
- A distribution, all the surroundings - I wrote build scripts, a package manager and documentation for a proof-of-concept Puppy "fork", which also has its own branding. This use of the term "fork" is kinda silly, since it's an independent distribution, but it's aimed at showing the world what my vision of Puppy 6 looks like; I'm a realistic person - building a POC of something is always better than explaining what it is in words. All its applications are built using the package building server, while the core binary packages come from Slackware (or any other distribution, I just need to implement support for it in my Woof implementation).
- A file system skeleton and init scripts. The package manager is ready, as I mentioned earlier, so I just need to write new init scripts. My experience with building small distributions should make it easy.

It's kinda funny that I find myself working on all these, since these are things I've already done in my past, but separately. I built my concept distribution (Calf GNU/Linux), which had its own skeleton, init scripts, package manager and binary packages, but lacked a proper building system.

Now I decided to go for it and build all 4 components, so I can see how far it gets. Unlike Saluki and other innovative Puppy initiatives, I'm starting from scratch - everything is fresh and clean, as the next Puppy generation should be. I'm not going to use Woof or Puppy's existing tools, because the best revolutions aren't transformations or natural evolution, but simple innovations that make things better.